Local sites painted by local artists: A-C Valley students take inspiration from landmarks
FOXBURG, Clarion Co. — The auditorium at Allegheny-Clarion Valley Junior/Senior High School is getting an overhaul so it can house new technology combining art and engineering education. The walls in the room are being designed to reflect that use.
A handful of students are working on paintings of natural landscapes scattered around the school district — Freedom Falls and the Allegheny River Trail, for example — which will adorn the walls of the auditorium once it is completed.
The art is part of what helped the school district earn a $400,000 PAsmart CTE Innovation Grant, which is funding the renovation to the auditorium, plus other technological updates for student use.
Kristin Thurber, federal grant coordinator at A-C Valley School District, said the auditorium and nearby hallway will have a studio boasting podcast equipment, as well as a green screen which students will learn how to use.
According to Thurber, the revamp of the auditorium will open up new possibilities for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math — or STEM — courses, but with an “A” for “Art” to allow students to explore their creative potential.
“We are going to take it a step further and make an innovation pit,” Thurber said. “Oftentimes we think of arts and engineering as two separate components. We don't see the crossover there, so I wrote the narrative that I wanted to tie in the whole engineering and design with the stage and really show the students that we can tie these two pieces together.”
The project is expected to be completed near the end of March.
Thurber said teachers at the school will also go through professional development courses to learn to teach and develop classes utilizing the new equipment.
The school district asked for community-wide input to make the new auditorium versatile, Thurber said.
“We did talk to Clarion PennWest to get some ideas about providing some college-in-high-school classes,” Thurber said. “We got a lot of insight from our local theater, Allegheny RiverStone Center for the Arts, they both sat on our committee as stakeholders.”
A-C Valley High School students have been working on paintings that will be displayed in the auditorium once it is complete. Some 11th- and 12th-grade artists volunteered to paint landscapes found within the school district’s area to populate the walls of the auditorium — a suggestion made by Thurber, who moved to the district the previous school year.
“One of the things I fell in love with here is just the landscaping,” Thurber said. “I said if we can build that into this space, I mean it’s really going to highlight who we are as a community and what’s important to us here.”
The paintings were well underway on Tuesday, Jan. 20.
Rachel Mortimer, art teacher at the high school, said students had a few landmarks to choose from, and some of them had taken reference photos themselves to base their pieces on.
Some are using oil paint, others are using acrylic, but Mortimer said the project excited the students who are making the art.
“I kind of let them choose what they would like to do. A lot of them have been there,” Mortimer said. “Some of them took pieces that are more meaningful to them.”
Sam Cuprinka, a junior at A-C Valley, used a photo she took on a bike trail to make her painting, which depicts a bridge near a forest with plenty of sky in the background.
Sam said she bike rides on the trail every summer and the scene she captured in a photo spoke to her because of the varying terrain she would get to paint using it as a reference.
“I like doing landscapes a lot better than people,” Sam said. “I like the bridge because it just added something to the landscape and you can see the river in the background.”
Another junior, Sage Lutz, worked on an acrylic painting of Freedom Falls, where she taught her dog how to swim. She said getting to paint a piece that will be displayed in the school for years to come was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“It’s going to be in the auditorium, so that’s pretty cool,” Sage said. “It will be there a pretty long time.”
The project is also the largest art piece that junior Sarah Bashline has worked on, not only in the longevity of the painting, but in the scene she drew from: an aerial photo of Emlenton featuring two bridges over the Allegheny River.
“I like how it shows so far out and I always liked landscapes,” Sarah said. “This is like the biggest thing I’ve ever done, but I have done landscapes before.”
Mortimer said although these pieces are destined for the auditorium walls once completed, the paintings will be duplicated and made larger, so the artists will get to keep their original works.
The school district has had to get creative in planning events since the auditorium started undergoing construction. Thurber said the elementary school’s Christmas concert took place in the elementary school and so have band concerts, which had been organized to feature certain grades or musicians so the audience was not too large to hold. The district also streamed the concerts online to accommodate more viewers.
Thurber emphasized the district is still teaching art classes at every grade level and the auditorium project is aimed at providing more artistic opportunities to students.
In addition to local stakeholders, the school district is partnering with Inventionland, a Pittsburgh-based company, which will provide professional development to the school’s staff. Thurber said the partnership is also made possible by the Innovation Grant.
Thurber said the professional development will take place in March, around the time the construction is supposed to be done on the auditorium.
The completion of the construction project will overhaul the STEAM possibilities at Allegheny-Clarion Valley and, Thurber said, classes based on the new technology will really kick in next school year.
“My focus was to tie in the arts,” Thurber said. “I emphasized the artistic piece of that and I thought that would kind of set us apart. It makes us a non-traditional STEM project.”
